Title:   This Girl is a Stencil

Author:  Miss Murchison

Rating: G

Disclaimer:  I have no claim to the TARDIS or any Torchwood files. I do, however, own a long, multi-colored scarf. And if anyone were to offer me Captain Jack, I wouldn't say "no."

Summary: Rose is fascinated by the flyers her mother posted while she was on her first travels with the Doctor.

Thanks: To Keswindhover for the beta.

This girl is a stencil of a brushstroke in the rain
She’s a ghost of the city she’s a body through the windscreen
This girl is the snowfall where the spring should have been
She’s the stains on the pages of a top shelf magazine

Rose was driven again and again to stare at the pile of "missing" flyers on her mum's table.  The girl in the pictures fascinated her. 

Because she wasn't Rose.  She was a composite of all the things that could have happened to Rose, but hadn't.  That girl was a thousand everyday tragedies, not a wild adventure in the stars. 

Rose wondered what people had thought when they saw the flyers posted around London.  There had been pity, certainly, and more than one parent had clutched his or her own child tightly, thankful it was someone else's daughter in the photo.  But because the world was full of bastards, there had also been gleeful speculations.  Someone had probably gotten off imagining the horrible things that had been done to the girl in the picture.

For her mum and Mickey, there had been anguish, anger, and blame.

But where had the real Rose been when those people had stared at her echo?  Had she been sipping a cocktail and listening to the Doctor chat up a seductive tree?  Had she been watching Charles Dickens come face to face with the impossible?  Some of the time, perhaps.  But her internal chronometer said she had not been gone a full year, and yet, here was this flyer insisting that she had been. 

Where had she been when her mum had first gone to the police, had taped the first poster to a kiosk, had wept in despair on the anniversary of her daughter's disappearance?   Impossible to make those events match up with Rose's actual itinerary.

These thoughts would not have occurred to the Doctor, who saw no contradiction in simultaneously measuring his lifetime of adventures in centuries and eons.   But Rose was human, and she used her concept of time to anchor herself in reality.  She couldn't release her grasp without losing herself.

The End

Please send feedback to: missmurchison@mchsi.com